Selection and Deflection

A pervasive human characteristic is the desire to alter one's consciousness as one sees fit. It is an extremely rare occasion to find a human being entirely satisfied with his/her current state of being. It is with the aforementioned concept in mind that I say that I am not surprised that people use the Internet to become who they want to be. What does surprise me (albeit only on a minuscule scale) is that people would lose themselves to this alternative. The case studies presented by Turkle did blindside me a bit. It seems foreign to me that so many people would succumb to unadulterated simularcum. (I assume this is why postmodernism takes center stage here.)
However, the concept seems to be anything but new. Haven't we been selecting and deflecting our own realities our entire lives. We select the personality tidbits we tell other people. We harbor resentments, we keep secrets. We wear our hearts on our sleeves. We make attempts to appear the way we would like ourselves to be. It is a ubiquitous concept that blurs all racial and gender lines. In a sense we are all participants in our own simularcum. Mudds, The Internet, and RPG's have not solely created this phenomenon, they have however significantly contributed to it's massive and complex proliferation.